


language of flowers

by magicandlight



Series: The States [22]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Flowers, Language of Flowers, M/M, Nicky knows all the flower meanings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 08:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14870198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicandlight/pseuds/magicandlight
Summary: floriography: (n.) a means of communication through the use or arrangement of flowers. also called the language of flowers.





	language of flowers

_daisy- innocence, loyal love_

He's still a colony and he doesn't understand the significance of the flowers blooming for him even when he does everything wrong.

All he knows is that Brooke laughs when he weaves the flowers into crowns for her to wear until they fall apart and he wants Adam to laugh too so he pulls up handfuls of daisies and turns them into crowns for him. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_aster- love_

Brooke writes her letters across from him. 

He can see his own name on one of the envelopes, but he knows better than to ask. 

It's one of the unspoken rules. Don't ask another state about their death-letters. 

He's been attempting to write Adam's for an hour.

In the first one, he'd wrote I love you fifty-seven times before he ripped it up. 

\------

In the end, he goes with simple. Writes _i love you_ and seals an aster in the envelope.

\------

(Brooke dies. Comes back. He burns his letter over a candle. The aster had withered, anyway.)

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_marigold- jealousy_

Brooke and Adrien love and love until they get broken and then they just get back up and give their hearts away again. 

But for Nicky, it has always been Adam. Unrequited as it may be. 

He grits his teeth when Eddie gets the courage to ask Adam out before him. 

Never mind that he's been trying to do that for a century now. 

All that blooms that year are marigolds. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_azalea- take care of yourself for me_

(He's over at Brooke's when Adam shows up. Nicky immediately notices how Adam's hands shake, the smear of blood on his shirt. Brooke says  _secret_  and he backs off.)

Nicky glances at Adam every so often. Sam's chair is empty, but then so is Connie's and Caleb's and half the territory's.

Adam looks tired. Really tired. Exhausted, actually.

\------

"Hey, you okay?" Nicky leans on the table beside Adam.

Adam pokes at his lunch. He isn't hungry. Maybe Sam's lack of care for food is rubbing off on him. "Hey, Nicky." He doesn't look up.

"Adam, I think you need a nap."

"Hm." He pokes the food with his fork again. Connie had made it. Sam had just curled further into her blankets when they tried to make her eat.

Connie was getting desperate, he knew. Neither of them wanted to watch the slow death starvation provided.

Nicky stares. "Okay, now you're kind of freaking me out. Come on, you can sleep at my place." Nicky pulls Adam to his feet, pulling Adam's bag over his other shoulder.

"But the meeting." Adam half-protests.

"I'll get Brooke to cover for us, she's good at that. Besides, there's always tomorrow."

Adam frowns for a moment. "Fine."

\------

Adam wakes up with a start.

_Where am-Right, Nicky's guest room._

There's humming coming room somewhere else in the house, followed by a  _click_  of something on the floorboards.

Adam shoves the quilt back, setting bare feet on the floor.

Nicky's in the kitchen, pouring something into a bowl while a dog paces around him. The dog's nails  _click_  at the floor with every step.

"Frankie, sit." Nicky mutters.

The dog sits obediently, and Nicky sets the bowl down. He crouches as the dog begins to eat, and carefully rubs behind Frankie's _(?)_ ears.

"Now, where has Miss Janie gotten off to, Frankie?" Nicky looks up at him and smiles.

"Hey, Adam. Don't suppose you saw a dog, about yay tall, arrogant, has a holier-than-thou expression?"

Adam's startled by the laughter that bubbles out of his mouth.

Another dog, this one smaller, prances in.

Adam didn't know dogs could prance.

Nicky points at Frankie. "Frankenstein, he's a collie, and Miss Jane Fairfax, who's a cocker spaniel."

Adam almost smiles. "I didn't know you read Austen."

Nicky shrugs. "I read a lot of things."

Adam looks around, noting all the plants- the flower box outside of the window, an arrangement of small pots on the counter that look like they hold spices and herbs, one pot in the middle of the island full of thriving violets.

A cat, well, the cat literally  _struts_  in, hops on top of the counter and rubs its head against Nicky's arm until he pets it. Its bright coppery-colored fur reminds him of Connie's hair.

"Mab, that's Adam, Adam, meet Queen Mab, she's- well, I'm not sure what breed she is."

Mab meowed at Nicky. "Ah, oh right, sorry, Mab."

Nicky turned, going for a pot that was hung on a hook from the ceiling. He picked off a leaf and offered it to the cat.

"What is  _that_?"

" _Nepeta cataria,_ " Nicky grinned when Adam just looked at him. "Catnip. Mab's addicted to this stuff."

A door opens somewhere and slams shut. Adam flinches. Nicky frowns. "Brooke, slam my door one more time!"

"And you'll do what exactly?" Adam jumps when Brooke speaks up behind him. He forgets that for all the lanky height Brooke and Nicky share, they've got grace and silent footsteps. 

Brooke smiles at Adam. "Hey, Adam. How are your sisters?"

 _How is Sam?_  Is what she means. He keeps forgetting that she knows. Well, that she knows as much as he and Connie do. The only one who can confirm what happened that night is Sam, and presently she has apparently decided to go mute.

"They're fine."

\------

Adam ends up staying for dinner. 

When he leaves, Nicky shoves a vase of flowers at him. "For your sisters or whatever."

Brooke snorts and Nick shoots her a glare. 

(Connie says they're azaleas. They put them in Sam's room. A day later, she starts eating again.)

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_red tulip- declaration of love_

Sam looks too nervous. She reaches for his hand as they step into Alfred's office, and he squeezes her hand reassuringly.

"Dad?" Sam calls, and Alfred looks up.

"Yes?"

"I have to tell you about 1822."

\-------

Alfred is holding Sam, and he's crying, and Sam is crying, and Adam feels like he lost something listening to Sam tell Alfred exactly what happened to her.

He'd known, vaguely, but hearing her say it...

It hollowed him out. He tries to go downstairs and join the other states, but they're too cheerful and loud for him right now. 

He goes outside instead. 

\-------

Nicky nearly trips over Adam in the garden.

He hadn't even seen him tucked in between the rose bushes. Reflexively, he tucks the single red tulip behind his back.

He was going to do it- tell Adam that he loved him and hope for the best. He eases his grip on the flower. He didn't want to mess it up. 

Nicky opened his mouth, and then noticed something. 

"Are you crying?"

Adam wiped his face. "No."

Nicky sits down between the rose bushes with him. 

After a moment, he sets the tulip down behind him, if only to wrap a comforting arm around Nicky's shoulders.

Eventually, Adam swears him to secrecy, and tells him. 

Nicky shoves his own anger that this could happen to one of them down and comforts Adam. 

It takes hours, and when Adam has been successfully calmed down, he hugs Nicky and says he's a good friend. He sits there until Adam has left before he goes too. 

Nicky leaves the tulip there. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_blue violet- faithfulness_

Adam is exhausted, but he still goes over to the window. 

The violets are still blooming. 

He smiles. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_iris-friendship_

Nicky settles the irises into the pots, thankful that both Brooke's and Adrien's birthdays were in the same month, and that Brooke wouldn't mind getting her present early. 

He brings the flowers to the meeting out of convenience and then has to pretend to be perfectly calm when Adam leans over to talk about the irises. 

 _You're supposed to be his friend_ , he thinks. 

Adrien raises an eyebrow across the table and _smirks_. Nicky flips him off when Adam isn't looking. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_yellow carnation- rejection_

"I'm pretty sure Adam doesn't know flower meanings." Brooke tries.

Nicky just rolls over to look out his bedroom window. 

At the yellow carnations. 

Adam probably didn't even know what they were. Just known that he had flower seeds and no garden to put them in and Nicky liked flowers, right?

And Nicky had planted them, watered them, and they'd bloomed into a flower that meant rejection. 

Nicky took it as a sign of fate. It'd been over a century. It was time to let go.

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_daffodil- regard, unrequited love_

Nicky dreams of fire. He dreams of fire everywhere, and thick, black smoke choking him. He dreams of devastating earthquakes and explosions. 

He wakes up gasping. The clock says 2 am, and for a second he thinks it was just a dream. Then he coughs, pain burning through his chest and throat. He coughs again, panicking when he can't get enough air to his lungs. He sits up and coughs again, reflexively covering his mouth.

Nicky's hand comes away wet. 

 _Blood_ , he thinks.  _Lungs. Jersey City. Black Tom. Munitions for the British. German sabotage._

He kicks away his blankets, rolling off his bed. 

He lands hard on his elbows and knees, but the pain there is dwarfed by the pain in his chest. 

_Brooke's closest. No. She's with Will. Connie._

He hits her door with an open palm. It stings, but he ignores then pain and does it again. 

"Why did- Nicky?" Connie's eyes are wide as she processes the scene. 

Nicky is only in his pajama pants, mouth and hands stained with blood, a dozen bleeding scratches marring his shoulders and chest. He's alternating between coughing and choking. He can't stop coughing, and he can't breathe.

Connecticut's eyes widen and she shouts something as New Jersey collapses, lack of oxygen finally getting to him.

\------------

Adam startles awake when Connie shouts. It takes a second for him to figure out why he woke up and another to get out into the hallway.

By this point, Sam has already sacrificed her cornflower-colored throw blanket to cover Nicky's bare chest. Foster and Connie were supporting him between them as Nicky coughed and gasped for breath. 

Adam froze. "What's wrong with Nicky?"

Sam turned halfway towards him. "We don't know. Go wake up Austin and Dad."

Nicky coughed again, harsher, and brought his hand up to his mouth. It came away red.

Blood. 

Adam stared.

"Adam! Go!" Sam barked at him.

\--------------

Austin eventually had to sedate Nicky, and told them all that he was lucky he hadn't had to break out the trach kit. He'd been close, but Nicky had started breathing again before he actually made the cut.

Sera told them in the morning that it was an explosion at Black Tom.

Black Tom was full of explosives meant to be sold to the British. The explosion was caused by a series of fires and was felt all the way in Philadelphia. (The latter fact came from Will, who kept rubbing a spot on his chest. Brooke had a decent sized cut on her sternum from the damage to her city.)

"Some people are saying it was the Germans." Sera had told them. "But no one knows for sure. It could have been an accident."

"Possible, but unlikely," Brooke responds. "We've been selling arms to the British, and the Germans know it."

It was possible this would be enough to put them into the war across the sea. 

They all hoped it wouldn't. 

\------------

When Nicky wakes up, his sister is sprawled over the foot of his bed and there's a bundle of bright yellow daffodils on his nightstand. 

When he asks, Brooke has no idea where they came from. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_red chrysanthemum- hope_

The first time that Adam realized he might have a chance with Nicky was in Paris, after the Great War.

That was the first time Adam had ever seen Nicky display interest in another boy. He'd always just assumed Nicky was straight because he'd never had a reason to think otherwise.

He hadn't even meant to see _it_.

 _It_ being Nicky kissing a boy in some dimly lit, sleazy pub. The boys hands crept lower on Nicky's hips and most people studiously ignored them.

Brooke (wingman, probably. wingwoman?) had rolled her eyes at Nicky and knocked back her glass of champagne. Both of the states had red flowers tucked into their hair, bright against their dark-hair. 

Nicky's fell out when the boy tangled his hands into his hair. 

Adam left without saying hello and with an empty feeling in his stomach.

(He avoids Nicky for awhile after that.)

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_nasturtium- victory_

They celebrate V-E Day in London, since it would be a waste to go home to celebrate only to go off to the Pacific.

Originally, they'd started out in a group of all the states that were there, but then they'd gotten split up. 

Brooke and Will were making out in some pub. Monty and Cam were wandering aimlessly around London. Sam and Foster were probably off doing god knows what. Callie was jump roping with some kids, camera bouncing around her neck with every jump.

The effects of war are clear in London, but everyone is smiling, celebrating. Adam can't stop grinning.

Nicky suddenly beams. "Wait, a sec, okay?"

He disappears before Adam can say anything, but he's content to stay and watch the people around him celebrate. 

Nicky pushes his way back over, holding a few delicate orange blooms. "Look, they're nasturtium flowers. They mean victory."

Nicky is grinning. He's beautiful and bright and holding out one of the orange flowers to Adam. 

Adam leans up on his tiptoes and presses a chaste kiss to Nicky's mouth before he has time to think about what a bad idea this is.

Nicky freezes under him.

Suddenly, Adam feels sick. He pulls away.

Nicky opens his mouth and then closes it again when he can't seem to force the words out.

"I'm sorry." He mutters. Adam can't bear to hear the rejection that was coming.

He runs.

\------------

Brooke bursts into Nicky's hotel room at one PM the next day, Adrien on her heels.

Nicky groans and burrows under his pillows. Brooke ignores what others would take as a dismissal, bouncing onto the bed.  _His elder sister, the lock-pick with no sense of boundaries._

"You look like hell." Adrien tells him bluntly. Understatement.

Nicky huffs a weak laugh. He rests his head on Brooke's thigh. She pets his hair and tuts at the knots she finds.

His two best friends exchange worried looks he pretends he can't see.

"Adam kissed me." He admits, looking at the wilting flowers on the table beside his bed. 

"Is that not a good thing?" Brooke's eyebrows furrow.

"And then he apologized and ran away."

"So, go find him." Adrien says easily.

"Can't. Already looked everywhere." Adam didn't want to be found. 

"Ask his sisters. Nicky, we ship out tomorrow. We go back to the Pacific Theater."

"So?" He replies, like he doesn't know where she's going with this.

"Adam isn't shipping out with us."

"Again, so?"

"Do it now, because who knows what will happen, this could drag out for  _years_." She told him gently. "You will be an entire continent and an entire ocean away from him."

Nicky sighs, getting up to go look for Sam and Connie. 

He doesn't find Adam. Brooke coddles him mercilessly the entire trip to the Pacific front. 

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

Adam had meant to go see his siblings the day they got back.

In the end, he just couldn't face the rejection Nicky was bound to give him.

So he stayed home with his fluffy socks and ice cream.

❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁ ❁

_violet- devotion; red tulip- i love you_

The first time Nicky and Adam see each other since the V-E Day incident is at a mandatory state meeting.

Sometimes, Adam decides after he sees the side-by-side place cards, he really dislikes Sera.

Nicky shows up five minutes before the meeting starts, and Adam screams internally. 

\------------

Adam ignores the note in front of him for awhile. He even manages not to look over at Nicky even when he starts poking him. 

Then he caves and opens it.

_Can we talk after the meeting?_

Adam swallows and nods. 

Nicky offers a small smile. 

\----------

Adam leans against the wall and tugged at the sleeves of his jacket.

Nicky paces in front of him. He stops, finally turning to face Adam.

"So, you- You kissed me." Nicky rubs the back of his neck.

"Yeah." Adam looks away.

"Did you mean it?"

Adam closes his eyes. "Yes."

Nicky was silent.  _And here comes the rejection. At least Nicky would probably let him down easily._

"Really?" Nicky asks.

Adam is silent, and keeps his eyes closed. He isn't going to cry in front of Nicky, and he knows he'll start crying if he has to look at Nicky when he turns him down. 

Nicky takes a deep breath. And then he grabs Adam's wrist and pulls him closer.

Adam's eyes snap open when Nicky kisses him.

\--------------

"So..." Adam begins, then stops to stare at Nicky as he rummages through his bag.

"Waitwaitwait..." Nicky pulls out a small bouquet of violets and single red tulip, which he immediately offers to Adam.

"Youwannagoonadatesometime?" Nicky says it so fast it came out as an incomprehensible jumble. 

"What?" Adam is still caught up on the fact that Nicky gave him flowers. 

"Do you-" The tips of Nicky's ears are turning red. It's sort of adorable. "Do you want to go on a date? With me?" The blush has reached his face by the time he finishes.

Adam stares. "Did you... just ask me out?"

Nicky nods wordlessly. Ridiculously, he looks worried. 

"Really?"

"Only if you want-" Adam kisses him.

He breaks away when he realizes he's probably squishing his flowers. He glances down at them again. "Hey, what do they mean?"

Nicky rubs the back of his neck. "Violets mean devotion, loyalty, and faithfulness, but I picked them because they're your- my- our state flower."

"And the tulip?"

"Red tulips are a declaration of love."

Adam kisses him again. 

**Author's Note:**

> -Frankenstein "Frankie" is named after (of course) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He was named for the doctor. 
> 
> -Miss Jane Fairfax "Miss Janie" is named after a character in Jane Austen's Emma.
> 
> -Queen Mab is named after a character in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
> 
> -red chrysanthemums usually mean I love you, but can mean hope too.
> 
> -the Black Tom explosion was an act of German sabotage to destroy munitions we were going to give to the British. it's on wikipedia. 
> 
> -There probably weren't nasturtium flowers at V-E day, but they do mean victory. 
> 
> -violets are both Rhode Island's and New Jersey's state flower. (Also Illinois')
> 
> -Adam eventually learns all of the flower meanings after an incident with striped carnations.


End file.
